It’s interesting to know that in the 1950s John Cage and Stefan Wolpe spent time together exchanging ideas at Black Mountain College and in New York City. Milton Babbitt and Wolpe also interacted in New York during the same period. In some ways Wolpe was more traditional than Babbitt or Cage, in others he was surely more eclectic. In any case, Wolpe taught and influenced many of the most important American composers of the next generation—composers of many different stripes: Charles Wuorinen, Ursula Mamlok, Morton Feldman, M. William Karlins, Ralph Shapey, and Harvey Sollberger, to name only a few.

From his many writings on his music, one finds that Wolpe had the sensibility of a poet. More than almost any other composer of his time, he was able to find ways to bridge the gap between qualitative and quantitative ways of describing composition and the music he cared about.

My first encounter with Wolpe was via the 1961 broadcast of his Symphony played by the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Stefan Bauer- Mengelberg. The originality and power of this and other pieces have continued to inspire me—so much so that I’ve written about Wolpe’s music on three occasions, and I will likely do so again.

The present text is a response to a keynote address by Christopher Hasty at the 1999 Wolpe Conference at Northwestern University. While I disclose some ways I hear Wolpe’s music, the paper certainly suggests ways to listen to my own music.

Rather than respond directly to Christopher Hasty’s lovely and inspiring paper, I want to think about Wolpe’s “ever-restored and ever-advancing witnessing moment” and Hasty’s point that we may not know how to think about the “vividness of a moment that is new and now.” Hasty’s invocation of Whitehead’s ideas of Beauty, and their connections to “process metaphysics,” will play a covert role in what I have to say.

Let me begin by repeating something I’ve frequently overheard: that Wolpe’s music, especially the late music, in its gestural and kinetic character, suggests that Wolpe is performing his musical thoughts and feelings in addition to merely making music out of them. I find this suggestion apt and insightful, but also elusive, for Wolpe’s musical thought-actions often appear discursive, indicating that we don’t really have a handle on what’s going on.